


She's So Unusual

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Good Tom Riddle, Tom Riddle is Not Voldemort, Young Tom Riddle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:33:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25794436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Tom Riddle's stuck on his great novel, until an unexpected encounter at the flat next door gives him some new ideas.
Relationships: Lavender Brown/Cormac McLaggen, Luna Lovegood/Tom Riddle
Comments: 40
Kudos: 177





	She's So Unusual

_Morty had been right all along. There was a monster inside him._

_Morty had been right, all this time. In the darkest reaches of himself, there lay a monster, coiled and ready to strike._

_In his despair, the stark truth of it struck Morty like the sharp edge of a mortal blade. In the darkest depths of his very soul, there lay, coiled and cold, torpid but stirring, a beast._

_Morty realized he had a snake. Deep inside himself. Right up his arse. He’s a kinky fuck._

“ _Fuck!_ ” With his headphones on, Tom feels but doesn’t hear the creak of his desk chair as he claps the lid of his laptop shut too hard and leans back, rubbing at his eyes with the tips of his fingers.

There’s a thumping vibration coming through the wall that his bedroom office shares with the neighboring flat, hard-edged and rhythmic.

He tosses back the remains of his coffee, cold for over an hour, acrid and filmy, and makes his way to the kitchen for another.

The headphones are high end, over-ear, noise-cancelling, pure black like everything else he owns, low profile and minimally designed, and an investment that has paid dividends in the preservation of Tom’s sanity. They’ve also attuned him to vibrations he never noticed before he owned them, like the protesting hardware of his chair, or the rumble of a lorry down the alleyway below the kitchen window, or Lavender Brown—who, though an entirely grown woman, wears pigtails with predictable regularity—getting railed by that self-satisfied blond prick she has over most nights.

Tom pulls the headphones off for a moment.

There’s the undeniable banging of the headboard against the wall, but with the headphones off, he can hear voices as well: the formless low murmur of the man—Corbin? Connor? Collin? Cockfuck McBastard?—talking incessantly, authoritatively, and Lavender, laughing and crying out what sounds like “Yes!” in a childish, high-pitched whine.

It’s theatrically lewd and goes on for fucking _hours._

Tom’s dick stirs.

He pulls his phone from the back pocket of his fitted black denims.

_Come over. I need my muse._

His phone is silent for fifteen minutes while he goes through the ritual of grinding whole beans for a single pour-over cup, folding the bottom and sides of a paper filter, lightly tamping the grounds down with the edge of the scoop. It isn’t until he’s back at his desk, headphones blocking out the form but not the energy of Cormac’s narrated power fucking when the phone on his desk vibrates.

_Sorry. Roddys tongue up my vagina atm._

Fuck.

Tom texts back. _Fucking your own husband, how pedestrian of you._

_Don’t be an idiot._

Tom doesn’t respond, and in another five minutes she texts again.

_Tony and Nott as well, doing the mirror series. You were invited._

Tom recalls the concept, involving an old VHS camera on a tripod, minute adjustments to the angles of half a dozen floor-to-ceiling mirrors, complex lighting, a smoke machine, a self-produced electronic score, Bellatrix herself and a bare minimum of two cocks. She’d told Tom about it post-coitally, sitting completely naked in the frame of her open bedroom window blowing the smoke of a clove cigarette outside, something about performative penetration and the undercurrents of narcissism in sex. It hadn’t been filmed yet and was pre-booked for two gallery shows. 

_No porno music vids but thanks._

_Where is the line between art and pornography? What are we showing and to whom and why? Why do I need the viewer to look?_

_Get off your phone and fuck._

Bellatrix signs off with a row of black hearts.

Tom opens his laptop.

_Deep inside himself, Morty felt the monster stir._

_It was alone._

Lavender works as an early childhood educator at the private school down the road, and when she’s not wearing leggings underneath stretch knit dresses with large pockets printed with bears and dinosaurs and owls and rainbows with an apparently endless supply of coordinating earrings, she wears leggings as pants, and shirts she ties in a knot above her navel.

When she’s not fucking loudly, enthusiastically— _joyously,_ Tom thinks—she hosts parties.

“We’d love for you to come over,” she says in the lift, arms wrapped around the pot of some kind of indoor fern. “In any case, we’ll try to keep the noise down.”

Tom thinks about the noise, and he’s staring, eyes narrowed, at the plant pot while he thinks it, which Lavender takes as interest.

“It’s a Boston fern. A botanist friend of mine gave it to me.” She smiles at him with her cherry-flavored lip glossed mouth, and it reaches the corners of her eyes. “I’ve been working on improving the energy flow in the flat.”

Tom leans into the wall of the lift and folds his arms over his chest. “Of course you have.”

The energy flows just fine in Tom’s flat.

It’s barely furnished, brutally clean, black and grey and white and small and free of the distractions he can’t have around himself while he writes.

Tom is thirty years old.

He lives alone, and writes novels about men who kill people.

He’s published four.

They’re selling well.

He has a book inside him that means more.

One that will make him immortal.

Once he’s put in enough popular words about murder for the night, he sits, and tries to write it.

There is a castle by a lake.

The castle is a metaphor for the man.

The monster in the castle is a metaphor for—

Tom leans back, closes his eyes, and tips his face towards the ceiling.

The energy flows through Tom’s flat.

It moves around the hard corners of the galley kitchen with three sets of plates, in case he has up to two guests.

Around the edge of the sofa he doesn’t use.

Over the tucked linens on the bed to which he brings women who don’t want to stay, and who he’s always relieved to see go.

It flows around him in his chair, at his desk, fingers poised over the keyboard without moving.

It flows around him, and then it moves on, with nothing there to catch it.

_“The phone rings, in the middle of the night . . .”_

It’s nearly midnight, and even with his own music in his headphones, the buzz and thump of Lavender’s party on the other side of the wall is unbearable.

_“Oh Daddy dear, you know you’re still number one . . .”_

Tom slaps his laptop shut.

He crosses the landing and knocks, but in the din on the other side, no one answers, so Tom opens the door to Lavender’s flat.

It’s the mirror image of his own, small kitchen beside a seating area, bathroom and bedroom down the hall.

Against the lease agreement, she’s painted her walls a very pale, warm blue-green, and between that and her milk-white shelving and pink velvet sofa and the books she’s apparently chosen for the coordinating colors of their spines and the massive cream-colored rug that looks like it’s made from illegally harvested Muppet hair, Tom feels like he’s standing inside the thoughtfully lit interior of an oyster shell.

How she’s packed in this many human bodies, he has no idea.

It’s futile, clearly, to tell her to quiet this gathering down, but the music could lose a few fucking decibels, at least, so he pushes his way past a host of pleasant-looking, smiling people who probably teach primary school.

_“Some boys take a beautiful girl, and hide her away from the rest of the world . . .”_

Lavender’s in the kitchen, mixing drinks.

McLager, clearly two sheets to the wind, stands behind her with his hand wrapped over the neat but obvious swell of her belly, mouthing at her neck and looking pleased with the undoubtedly unintended consequences of his bedroom athleticism.

“Let me see the ring again!”

There’s a girl—Tom was introduced in the lift once—Parvati, pulling Lavender’s left hand towards herself, examining the modest diamond ring there.

“My baby picked it out all on his own,” says Lavender, like she’s congratulating a toddler on a successful nappyless wee. She turns her head and shares a prolonged and socially inappropriate kiss with McJäger, who seems ready to take his proclivities for talking while fucking public.

There’s a tickle at the back of Tom’s mind, and then the dawning realization that this isn’t just a party, it’s an _engagement_ party, but before he can walk himself in his black denims and a black t-shirt and cleanly kept black Converse and black hair and melanin-poor skin out the door and back to the cool solitude of the word mines, Lavender wiggles her way out of McJerkass’s grip and pushes her way past the strange mix of obvious footballers and their wives, teachers and idealistic public servants that are her and her new fiance’s friends.

“Tom!”

She gives Tom a hug that ought to be awkward, but doesn’t feel that way.

He’s struck by the hardness of a little pregnant belly.

“So glad you decided to pop over,” she says, and she pulls him by the hand to the bar.

Before Tom can say more than “Congratulations,” she’s mixed up an Old Fashioned and pressed it into his hand.

“I can’t drink for a bit obviously, so enjoy it for me.”

The smile reaches the corners of her eyes. Like it always does.

He does enjoy the drink.

He enjoys it sitting on one end of the sofa, listening to a woman with masses of brown hair bickering intimately with a very tall, pale, perpetually sneering man, who seems to take enormous pleasure in goading her.

He enjoys it standing in a corner alone, checking a text from Bellatrix.

_Do you need your muse?_

He sips his drink and runs his thumb over the keypad on his phone.

_Not tonight._

He enjoys it sitting in the window of Lavender’s bedroom, clean and tidy and smelling of gardenia hand lotion and decorated in fucking lavender, its door propped open to make standing room for Lavender and Cormac’s too-many friends.

She’s placed a long rectangular tufted pillow on the window seat, ranged floral-patterned throw pillows around it, and draped it with a small quilt that looks like it was hand-stitched by an arthritic grandmother in the back of a covered wagon on the Oregon trail. Tom sinks into the whole arrangement, sucking down the last, ice-watered mouthful of bourbon.

He closes his eyes.

The man is the castle, the castle is the man.

The castle has high, cold walls. It echoes inside. It is hollow and empty.

Not empty.

Inside there is a—

The other side of the cushion in the window seat bends under someone’s weight, and someone’s knees press into his thigh.

Tom opens his eyes.

“Do you mind if I sit here? It means we’ll be touching.”

Tom’s first, troubling thought is that someone’s brought their teenage daughter to this party, and that she’s touching him, a thirty year-old man, with her knees, but he realizes quickly that she’s just one of those both fortunate and unfortunate victims of accentuated neoteny. Beyond her massive, staring blue eyes and round face, there are context clues that suggest she’s in her early twenties.

She has a mass of truly striking, lustrous blonde hair, woven into a complex braid that hangs over her shoulder, but it looks mythical, not juvenile. It’s midnight, but she’s wearing a work badge. Her top is nice— _professional_ —the sort of style that she’s probably aware helps age her up, but when Tom looks at it closely he realizes the little print on the fabric is of tiny spoons.

“Spoons.” He takes an ice cube into his mouth and chews it.

She nods, and Tom feels her knees shift against his leg. “They have such great energy.”

Tom scoffs, and looks at her badge.

“Luna.”

“Yes.”

“Oxford?”

Luna smiles. “I took the train at six o’clock.”

Tom decides that with her knees against his leg, he’d like her to be closer to twenty-two than to eighteen. “Are you a graduate student or something?” 

Luna shakes her head. “No. I do research.”

Tom crunches another ice cube. “Research?”

“Yes. I also teach.”

“Teach what?”

“Physics.”

Tom refrains from telling her that this surprises him, and in the space created in the conversation, Luna looks into his soul.

It happens briefly, in an instant, but he passes from idle small talk with a lovely, ethereal, young, and emphatically non-threatening woman, to the unshakable and profound sense that he’s sitting naked before her, stripped down to his essentials. He has the impulse to cover not his crotch or his gut or his eyes or any of the vulnerable places on the human body that reflexes have evolved to protect, but his heart.

He finds that he’s put a hand there, rubbing over his t-shirt as though he’s taken an elbow to the sternum.

“Are you going to ask me what I do?” he asks, trying and not entirely succeeding to break the moment.

He, Tom Riddle, never, _ever_ feels nervous.

She is unnerving him all the same.

“I wasn’t, no.”

She doesn’t say anything else, just keeps looking at him, and Tom finds himself speaking without being spoken to.

“I write novels. About serial killers, and the police. That kind of thing. They’re quite warmly received. Noted for the mastery of their prose.”

“What else do you write?” she asks.

“What else?” Tom swirls the remaining pair of melting ice cubes around in the bottom of his empty glass. “Does there need to be a ‘what else’?”

She shakes her head, and pushes her braid back absently. “There doesn’t need to be, but there is.”

“Not really.” He eats the last two ice cubes at the same time. “I mean, not as such.”

“You’re having a difficult time with it?”

“With what?”

“The book you’d prefer to write.”

Tom scoffs again.

“What kinds of Physics research do you do, Luna from Oxford on the six o’clock train?”

“Dark energy.”

“Dark energy,” Tom repeats, stupidly.

“I’m not surprised you’re struggling,” she says. “You have a lot of—” Luna reaches towards Tom and makes a gesture like she’s plucking away a bit of lint, but from mid-air a foot away from his body. She smiles at him. “That doesn’t help. And the blockage.”

“Blockage?” Tom sits up tall, defensive. “I’m not blocked. I write a great deal.”

“No.” Luna shakes her head, and Tom notices for the first time that her dangling earrings are a pair of carrots. “You’re blocked, among other places, here.”

She reaches a hand towards him, and Tom is completely sure for a moment that she’s going to palm his cock, and feels a responding stir of interest, but she only gestures in the general area.

He looks down. “I’m blocked in my—”

“Your sacral chakra is very clouded. Have you been having enough sex?”

“Yes! I—” He clears his throat. “Yes.”

“Too much of the wrong kind?”

Tom laughs then, both cynical and truly amused. “What’s the wrong kind of sex, Luna?”

She looks off into the room, lost in thought, then back to Tom.

"My breasts are very tender at the moment. You’ll need to avoid any particularly hard gripping. And please be conscientious about the way you touch my nipples.”

Tom, his glass to his lips, chokes on the last half ounce of melted water in his drink. “Your what?”

“Like this?”

On top of his plain grey duvet, Tom looks up with half-lidded eyes from Luna’s perfectly round breast, and flicks the tip of his tongue over her currently sensitive nipple.

“Just like that,” she says. It’s a whisper that travels down his spine and lodges in the base of his cock, and he feels himself twitch inside of her.

Tom has been with enough women to appreciate that the way Luna rolls her hips, the way she runs her fingers through his hair and over his chest and around his nipples, just as hard as hers, is different.

The word _better_ isn’t right, because this isn’t about good sex in the way Tom understands sex to be good—the way he _understood_ it, right up until this moment.

He thinks, for some reason, of the garden in the children’s home he grew up in, concrete but for a single patch of hard, bare dirt no one was allowed to dig in.

There was a ball he liked more than the others, which he would hit in a very satisfying way with a stick, until the sticks were removed.

“Just like that,” Luna says, and Tom knows she isn’t talking about her nipples anymore, she’s talking about the way he’s fucking lost in her cunt, dripping wet, _yes,_ clenching down on his fucking cock like she’ll never get enough of him, _yes,_ the sex is _good_ — _she’s so fucking good_ —but she’s also so fucking soft and present and open, not just her perfect, beautiful cunt, but _her_ — _f_ _uck_ —

Her eyes are large, and clear, and when she comes with soft, small, achingly sweet sounds, she keeps them open. 

He wants to close his own down, to squeeze his eyelids shut while he pulls out and comes across her belly or her breasts, but he doesn’t.

“You can finish inside me,” she says.

When he does, he leaves his eyes open.

He stays open.

“The castle is a metaphor for the man?”

Tom raises his arm from over his eyes and lifts his head from his pillow.

“Yeah.” He sounds groggy to himself, thick and spent, like he’s hungover from one bourbon.

The light outside his window is still new, still not entirely _present._

Luna sits in his chair at his desk, wearing Tom’s black t-shirt from last night, and no knickers, her thin white knees tucked up under her chin, looking at the open document for Tom’s stalled great novel.

She sips at the rim of the cup of tea he peeled himself from his bed to make for her.

“And the beast in the caverns below is threatening? A terrible monster.”

“That’s the idea.”

“And you start, and stop, and start again.”

“I do.”

Luna turns away from the laptop and looks— _really_ looks, she’s incapable of not _really fucking looking_ —at Tom.

“Have you tried talking to it?”

“To what?”

“To the beast.”

“Talk to the snake.”

“Yes.” Luna sets down her teacup and wraps her arms around her legs. “It sounds terribly lonely.”

“Lonely.” Tom shakes his head, rubs at his sleep-sore eyes, then pulls the duvet aside. “Come here, you mad thing.”

She crawls over the end of the bed, and he wants her in his arms again, because she fits so unexpectedly perfectly into his body, like he’s custom tailored to her, like she is his spoon, and he is hers, but she pauses halfway across the bed, and pulls his t-shirt off over her head.

Her blonde hair spills down over her shoulders, all the way to her waist, and she pushes it aside to pull gently at her nipples.

“I’d like more sex.”

Tom sits up on his elbows. “If you insist. Does my sacral chakra need more clearing?”

“Yes. But I also like your penis very much. It’s just the right amount of stretch, and goes deep without hitting my cervix.”

Tom laughs.

Real, deep, and uncynical.

There is something, down in the furthest reaches of himself.

He feels it stir.

He greets it as it wakes.


End file.
